Notes on Nursing | Page 9

all the
doors, and closing all the passage windows. It was that the slops were
emptied into the foot pans;--it was that the utensils were never properly

rinsed;--it was that the chamber crockery was rinsed with dirty
water;--it was that the beds were never properly shaken, aired, picked
to pieces, or changed. It was that the carpets and curtains were always
musty;--it was that the furniture was always dusty; it was that the
papered walls were saturated with dirt;--it was that the floors were
never cleaned;--it was that the uninhabited rooms were never sunned,
or cleaned, or aired;--it was that the cupboards were always reservoirs
of foul air;--it was that the windows were always tight shut up at
night;--it was that no window was ever systematically opened, even in
the day, or that the right window was not opened. A person gasping for
air might open a window for himself. But the servants were not taught
to open the windows, to shut the doors; or they opened the windows
upon a dank well between high walls, not upon the airier court; or they
opened the room doors into the unaired halls and passages, by way of
airing the rooms. Now all this is not fancy, but fact. In that handsome
house I have known in one summer three cases of hospital pyæmia, one
of phlebitis, two of consumptive cough: all the immediate products of
foul air. When, in temperate climates, a house is more unhealthy in
summer than in winter, it is a certain sign of something wrong. Yet
nobody learns the lesson. Yes, God always justifies His ways. He is
teaching while you are not learning. This poor body loses his finger,
that one loses his life. And all from the most easily preventible
causes.[9]
[Sidenote: Physical degeneration in families. Its causes.]
The houses of the grandmothers and great grandmothers of this
generation, at least the country houses, with front door and back door
always standing open, winter and summer, and a thorough draught
always blowing through--with all the scrubbing, and cleaning, and
polishing, and scouring which used to go on, the grandmothers, and
still more the great grandmothers, always out of doors and never with a
bonnet on except to go to church, these things entirely account for the
fact so often seen of a great grandmother, who was a tower of physical
vigour descending into a grandmother perhaps a little less vigorous but
still sound as a bell and healthy to the core, into a mother languid and
confined to her carriage and house, and lastly into a daughter sickly and

confined to her bed. For, remember, even with a general decrease of
mortality you may often find a race thus degenerating and still oftener a
family. You may see poor little feeble washed-out rags, children of a
noble stock, suffering morally and physically, throughout their useless,
degenerate lives, and yet people who are going to marry and to bring
more such into the world, will consult nothing but their own
convenience as to where they are to live, or how they are to live.
[Sidenote: Don't make your sick-room into a ventilating shaft for the
whole house.]
With regard to the health of houses where there is a sick person, it often
happens that the sick room is made a ventilating shaft for the rest of the
house. For while the house is kept as close, unaired, and dirty as usual,
the window of the sick room is kept a little open always, and the door
occasionally. Now, there are certain sacrifices which a house with one
sick person in it does make to that sick person: it ties up its knocker; it
lays straw before it in the street. Why can't it keep itself thoroughly
clean and unusually well aired, in deference to the sick person?
[Sidenote: Infection.]
We must not forget what, in ordinary language, is called
"Infection;"[10]--a thing of which people are generally so afraid that
they frequently follow the very practice in regard to it which they ought
to avoid. Nothing used to be considered so infectious or contagious as
small pox; and people not very long ago used to cover up patients with
heavy bed clothes, while they kept up large fires and shut the windows.
Small pox, of course, under this _régime_, is very "infectious." People
are somewhat wiser now in their management of this disease. They
have ventured to cover the patients lightly and to keep the windows
open; and we hear much less of the "infection" of small pox than we
used to do. But do people in our days act with more wisdom on the
subject of "infection" in fevers--scarlet fever, measles, &c.--than their
forefathers did with small pox? Does not the popular idea of "infection"
involve that people